War Against The Panthers:
A Study Of Repression In America 

HUEY P. NEWTON / Doctoral Dissertation / UC Santa Cruz 1jun1980

WAR AGAINST THE PANTHERS:
A STUDY OF REPRESSION IN AMERICA

A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of:

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

by
Huey P. Newton

June 1980

PREFACE

There has been an abundance of material to draw upon in researching and writing this dissertation. Indeed, when a friend recently asked me how long I had been working on it, I almost jokingly replied, "Thirteen years—since the Party was founded." ¹ Looking back over that period in an effort to capture its meaning, to collapse time around certain significant events and personalities requires an admitted arbitrariness on my part. Many people have given or lost their lives, reputations, and financial security because of their involvement with the Party. I cannot possibly include all of them, so I have chosen a few in an effort to present, in C. Wright Mills' description, "biography as history."²

This dissertation analyzes certain features of the Party and incidents that are significant in its development. Some central events in the growth of the Party, from adoption of an ideology and platform to implementation of community programs, are first described. This is followed by a presentation of the federal government's response to the Party. Much of the information presented herein concentrates on incidents in Oakland, California, and government efforts to discredit or harm me. The assassination of Fred Hampton, an important leader in Chicago, is also described in considerable detail, as are the killings of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles. Supporting evidence for a great deal of this dissertation has come from two federal civil rights lawsuits filed by the Party: one initiated in 1976 in Washington, D.C., and still pending against the FBI and other federal agency officials,³ and another which ended after a nine-month trial in Chicago, Illinois.⁴

It is logical that Oakland, California, should be the focus of hostile government actions against the Party because it is the place where the Party was founded, and it is the center of its organizational strength. In discussing Party leaders, including myself, and events in which they were involved, there has been a persistent temptation to write personally and emotionally. Individuals, with all their strengths and weaknesses, make significant differences in the outcome of political struggles; however, their roles are too often romanticized, clouding an understanding of the political forces propelling them into struggle. I have tried to maintain an objectivity consistent with scholarly standards by placing the roles of the involved personalities in proper political perspective. To aid in this effort, I will be referred to throughout this study in the third person. This dissertation is then, by necessity, illustrative, not exhaustive; a history in brief, not a biography of the Black Panther Party [BPP].

What is perhaps most significant about [this study] is that it suggests how much we still do not know. How many people's lives were ruined in countless ways by a government intent on destroying them as representatives of an "enemy" political organization? What "tactics" or "dirty tricks" were employed, with what results? Perhaps we shall never know the answers to these questions, but this inquiry about the BPP and the federal government will hopefully help us in our search for "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

1 The Black Panther Party is referred to throughout this dissertation as "The Party," "the Panthers," and "the BPP." All [these] terms are used interchangeably and refer to the same organization.

2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 173.

3 On January 25, 1980 the court dismissed our lawsuit because we refused to disclose the names and addresses of BPP members and provide additional information concerning criminal charges ending against certain members. We did provide the government with the names and addresses of all Central Committee members, i.e., the governing body of the Party, who are publicly known. Since the purpose of our lawsuit was to seek redress against unlawful government actions a gains our members, we had an obligation to protect their right of anonymity as an integral part of [a] minority political association that seeks through litigation to halt the government from illegally harassing its members. This will now be resolved by an appellate court. The Black Panther Party v. Levi, No. 76-2205, U.S. Dist. Ct. (D.C.). See also, San Francisco Chronicle, 26 January 1980, p. 2, col. 2.

4 Iberia Hampton v. City of Chicago, No. 70-C-1384, U.S. Dist. Ct. (N.D. I11., 1977). On June 2, 1980, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling cleared the way to reopen this case.

 

I. INTRODUCTION

From the point of its founding, democratic government in the United States of America has faced the challenging need to overcome certain obstacles inherent in both its organization and general structure before many of its basic assumptions could be actualized.¹ Learned and astute observers of the founding and development of American democracy noted the threatening nature of a number of these obstacles during the early days of the new republic.² The study proposed here finds its importance and justification in the concept that several of the original problems of American democracy have endured with increasing ominous consequences for the full realization of democratic government in the United States. In particular, two of the most crucial problems which have hindered the development of truly democratic government in America are treated here:

1. class and racial cleavages, which have historically been the source of division and bitter antagonism between sectors of American society, and

2. the inherent and longstanding distrust held by the American ruling class of any institutionalized democracy involving the mass population.³

The continuing existence of these two problems—compounded, of course, by companion evils—has from one time to another enlarged and set in motion a debilitating dialectic which has kept full democracy at bay, and the very fabric of American society in rather constant peril. What is hoped for here is an examination of specific responses and events related to the aforementioned major problems that is capable of shedding an enlightening beacon of light on the nature and progression of maladies related to these problems and what is thereby portended for American society in terms of present results and future possibilities. There is, in other words, the intent to forge an analysis capable of informing and instructing those who are devoted to and must continue to grapple with these outstanding problems, problems in need of being resolved if ever democratic government in America is to achieve any degree of substance consistent with its theoretical suppositions and ideals.

The first problem in American democracy set forth here was offered the summary justification by the Founding Fathers that it was a "limited" representative or republican form of democracy that was best suited and most desirable for the new country's governance.⁴ This intent, "limited" though it is, was mocked by the peculiar contradiction that the populace to be served by the new government included sizeable sectors which were not to be regarded as beneficiaries of even the most "limited" promise of democracy. African Americans, Native Americans, and, to a lesser extent, women were never presumed to be within the pale of either hopes or guarantees related to the practice of democracy. This marked exclusion in the idealism of America's founders might well be regarded as the original wellspring of dissent in America, for what is all too apparent is the fact that democracy is a dynamic and infectious idea. It is an idea which inspires the hope of universal inclusion. Thus, it may subsequently have been predicted that the arbitrary, capricious, and sinister exclusion of large sectors of the American population from the hopes inspired by the rhetoric of a fledgling democracy would give rise to the most determined forms of human struggle imaginable, including those which resort to force of arms, and resolve to face death before capitulation. The deliberately designed and nurtured class and racial cleavages of American society, present from its beginning, have fostered such extreme antagonisms during every period in the development of American society.⁵

This study draws upon a course of events taking place during the latter half of the twentieth century, which exemplifies the ultimate form of struggle born of this contrived contradiction, a contradiction which is as old as the life of the American republic itself. The contradiction which provides much of the source material for this study would doubtless have never existed nor reached such dastardly and volatile proportions if it were not for the societalwide ingestion of a class—and racially-biased social philosophy, which stemmed from the original premise of American social organization, a deeply ingrained belief that society [is] by nature divided into superior and inferior classes and races of people. This vision of the "natural order" of society, rationalized by those who have a vested interest in its maintenance, has kept Americans of different classes and races either directly engaged in social warfare, or forever poised in a position of battle. There has been, in other words, from the very beginning of the American republic as we know it, a systematically cultivated polarization, which has predisposed the population to varying but continuous levels of warfare. This sinister and carefully maintained die of social antagonism has been recast with the changing mold of each different epoch of American society.

Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage.⁶ Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence. In other times, there has been political repression, peonage (debt slavery), wage slavery, chicanery, and the like, but always accompanied by the actual or threatened force of violence.

The import of the combined forces of industrialization and urbanization [has] been [a] principal contributor in the twentieth century to the need of the American ruling class to develop newer, less obvious, and more effective means of retaining its control of and domination over the mass of Americans. Direct and unconcealed brute force and violence—although clearly persisting in many quarters of society—are today less acceptable to an increasingly sophisticated public, a public significantly remote from the methods of social and economic control common to early America. This is not a statement, however, that there is such increased civility that Americans can no longer tolerate social control of the country's under classes by force of violence; rather, it is an observation that Americans today appear to be more inclined to issue endorsement to agents and agencies of control which carry out the task, while permitting the benefactors of such control to retain a semidignified, clean-hands image of themselves. This attitude is very largely responsible for the rise of the phenomenon to which systematic attention is given in the study undertaken here: the rise in the 1960s of control tactics heavily reliant upon infiltration, deliberate misinformation, selective harassment, and the use of the legal system to quell broad based dissent and its leadership.⁷

Such tactics are, of course, closely identified with the presidency and administration of Richard M. Nixon, although many of these tactics were used prior to the Nixon years.⁸ However, it was under the leadership of Nixon that Americans in their majority—when they were confronted by widespread protest over both domestic and foreign policies—issued to the government and its agencies what appeared to be blanket approval of the squelching of dissent by means legal or illegal. This led inexorably to a vast and pernicious campaign of no-holds-barred conspiracies and extralegal acts designed by law enforcement agencies to "neutralize", contain, and/or destroy organizations and individuals thought to be "enemies" of the American government (or the status quo), merely because they dared to disagree openly with the existing order and its policies. Such campaigns were tragically successful in too many cases for too many years before Americans began to realize the true extent of the victimization.

It is a fundamental assertion of this study that the majority society, in its fear-provoked zeal to maintain and assure its inequitable position in American society, flirted with and came dangerously close to total abandonment of the particular freedom upon which all others are ultimately dependent, the right to disagree. Moreover, it is an ancillary claim of this study that the danger has not yet passed, for few if any of society's major problems have been solved, and a large number of Americans seem yet inclined to believe that special treatment and different rules can be applied to Americans who dare to disagree without consequence for those who are in agreement with the powers and policies that be. This [belief] is to be specifically denied, and the claim to be made is that repression of selected sectors of mass society is extremely difficult to carry out, if not impossible, without a resulting loss of cherished freedoms for the entire society.⁹ This premise constitutes a seminal focal point and objective of the analysis to be undertaken.

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was formed in this country in 1966 as an organization of Black and poor persons embracing a common ideology, identified by its proponents as "revolutionary intercommunalism.¹⁰ Since its inception, the Party has been subject to a variety of actions by agencies and officers of the federal government intended to destroy it politically and financially. It is the major contention of this dissertation that this official effort to destroy the BPP was undertaken precisely because of the Party's political ideology, and potential for organizing a sizeable group of the country's population that has been historically denied equal opportunity in employment, education, housing, and other recognized basic needs. A corollary to this theory is that governmental efforts at destruction of the Party, successful in varying degrees, were only thwarted or held in abeyance when they reached their logical consequence: destruction of the right of dissent for all groups, a right indispensable to the functioning of a democratic society.

The method employed to substantiate this theory is an examination of numerous measures undertaken by the government to, in the words of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" the BPP.¹¹ For the most part, records and documents of relevant government agencies initiating and participating in this campaign of destruction against the BPP provide the evidentiary basis for the dissertation. These records and documents, many revealed herein publicly for the first time, have been discovered in litigation between the BPP and government agencies, as well as through congressional investigations, scholarly studies, and media reports. In addition, firsthand knowledge of the author as a witness or participant to certain events, interviews with persons knowledgeable about relevant matters, and secondary sources of information (e.g., other studies and news reports) are used and identified. Most of the evidence of government efforts to destroy the Party focuses on the FBI because it was the major known offender in terms of intensity and severity of actions, but brief sections on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are also included.

The result of this study is an analysis of what happened, and still can happen, to a dissident political organization that explicitly challenges the policies and practices of a government intent on controlling the pace and degree of integration for a sizeable group of persons seeking equal socioeconomic participation. Moreover, this study shows the lengths to which, so far at least, a government can go in a constitutional democracy before it must choose between destroying a dissident political organization, or in the process of doing so, the very fabric of constitutional democracy.

It is the conclusion of this dissertation that the federal government was forced to suspend temporarily its most egregious actions directed at destroying the BPP, but that these measures pose an ever-present danger of recurrence to dissident political organizations with perceptions of the government similar to those of the BPP.

The basic methodological approach to the problem to be examined is one requiring the identification of a number of particular response patterns to particular forms of dissent. The basic materials used are over 8,000 250-page volumes of recently released reports and "intelligence" information. This information was collected by various police and government agencies and has been used against a number of activists and dissenters who were believed to pose a threat to the existing order. An effort is made to compare empirical evidence accrued from the writer's own participation and observation to the statements and recorded experiences of similarly situated participant-observers.

Objectivity is in every instance strived for, but it is in no instance guaranteed due to the observer's proximity to much of what is found to be characteristic of those patterns most fruitful to observe. A substantial amount of material gathered in personal interviews and taken from sworn depositions and trial statements made under oath is used in the construction of analyses.

As stated above, this study is presented in a historical manner. This style was chosen in order to develop an analysis of repression by the use of chronological fact. In this way, repression cannot be viewed as a new and unsophisticated set of tactics developed for only an isolated group or individual.

It is germane to this study, however, that of the dissident groups which were established in the last twenty years, the Black Panther Party was singled out for concerted, consistent, and violent attack, harassment, and media abuse. In early 1969, then U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell stated that the Justice Department would "wipe out the Black Panther Party by the end of 1969."¹² Edward V. Hanrahan, Cook County's former state attorney in Chicago, when asked about the murder of Fred Hampton, which Hanrahan authorized, stated that it was "justified because of the vicious activities of the Black Panther Party."¹³

These pages do not reflect the personal pain and anguish, the resulting physical and emotional disabilities, as well as the continual financial setbacks the writer has suffered. However, a sensitive person can infer these things from the study. Such an overwhelming number of incidents occurred that it is difficult to imagine that anyone living during this period of history was not affected. The participant-observer has been shot, ambushed, followed, and verbally and physically threatened and abused. His wife and family are under constant surveillance and also have been attacked and threatened. In every apartment or home in which he has lived since 1966, the premises have been burglarized, searched, and bugged (as was his bedroom in an apartment in Oakland, California, in 1974). In addition, mail has been intercepted or received already opened. Far more devastating are the brutal deaths of the writer's personal friends: Bobby Hutton, murdered by the Oakland police in 1968; Alprentice Carter, murdered in Los Angeles in 1969 by men working in association with the FBI; and George Jackson, who was murdered at San Quentin Prison in 1971. The participant-observer has spent a total of three years (1967—1970) in prison, has been arrested numerous times, has spent the last thirteen years in court (an average of two trials per year), and from 1974 to 1977 was in involuntary exile as a protection from physical abuse and death. All of these incidents of the writer's knowledge of repression are intended to substantiate the chronology's factual information from a personal view. The participant-observer, in addition, is the leading and founding member of the organization, said to be "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."¹⁴ Although it may seem that the writer is somewhat disadvantaged because of his proximity to the events discussed in this study, it is this very proximity that gives clarity to the specific conflict discussed. Finally, this study attempts to explain why the beliefs of the Black Panther Party and those of the American government and its intelligence agencies have resulted in continuing conflict.

1 The most concisely stated and meaningful assumptions of American democracy having a direct bearing on the well-being and future of the American people were manifested in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, upon which the new American government was founded. Consistent with their importance, the new government, it is generally agreed, may have faced ratification problems of indefinite duration without the inclusion of the ten amendments to the Bill of Rights. As it were, their inclusion eased and finally assured the ratification of the new Constitution.

2 Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

3 See the debate on this issue at the Constitutional Convention. (Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, New York: Knopf, 1948).

4 Ibid. See also "To the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention: September 5, 1970," in Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 156—162. [Publisher's note—New York: Writers and Readers, 1995.]

5 Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Garr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1969).

6 See e.g., Oliver C Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York Monthly Review Press, 1959).

7 See Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1976) for both a detailed and general account of the use of such tactics against American dissenters. See also U.S. Congress. House. United States Presidents, 1969—1974 (Nixon). Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Richard M. Nixon: April 30, 1974 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), 1308.

8 Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are known to have made use of unlawful and unfair "tricks" designed to undermine and/or deceive those in opposition to their policies.

9 William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1959).

10 For a fuller explanation of revolutionary intercommunalism, see p. 33—36. See also, Newton, To Die for the People, pp. 22—32, and Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton, In Search of Common Ground (New York: W.W. Norton ,1973), pp. 23—36.

11 FBI Memorandum from Headquarters to All Special Agents in Charge, August 25, 1967. Hereinafter "Hqtrs" and "SAC" will be used to refer to Headquarters and Special Agents in Charge, respectively.

12 Newsweek February 1969.

13 Time, December 12, 1969, p. 20.

14 J. Edgar Hoover, quoted in U.S. Congress. Senate. Book III: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 2nd sess.,1976, p. 187.

The use by law enforcement agencies of disinformation, under-cover agents, provocateurs, harassment, and informants did not begin with the war against the Black Panther Party. Repression based on race, religion, and radicalism has a long history in the United States, and the tactics and strategies used against the BPP have been employed by the government since the nation's founding. This chapter will briefly outline examples of government repression and disregard for the constitutional rights of dissident groups in America since the turn of the century.

After the Civil War, American workers, led by social revolutionaries, focused their struggle on the eight-hour day. By 1867, six states had adopted the shorter work day and in 1868 Congress passed the first federal law giving the eight-hour day to federal employees. The state laws, however, did not provide for enforcement, and in 1876 the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the federal law.¹

Labor recognized that it would have to win its own battle, and by mid 1886, 250,000 industrial workers were involved in the movement. In Chicago, which had become the center of the labor movement as well as of socialism in the United States, 400,000 workers had struck for the eight-hour day.²

A mass meeting in support of the eight-hour day was held on May 3, 1886; joining in the meeting were workers from the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, who had been on strike since February. While August Spies of the Social Revolutionary Club was speaking to the crowd, strikebreakers began to leave the nearby McCormick plant, and the striking workers began to demonstrate against the scabs. "A special detail of 200 police arrived and, without warning, attacked the strikers with clubs and revolvers, killing at least one striker, wounding five or six others, and injuring an undetermined number."³

A protest meeting was called for May 4 at Haymarket Square. As the final speaker, Samuel Fielden, addressed the small group, police suddenly began to disperse it. A dynamite bomb was thrown. One policeman was instantly killed. Six later died; about seventy were wounded. The police opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding an unknown number.

A nationwide wave of repression followed the Haymarket incident. Socialists and anarchists were rounded up indiscriminately Raids were staged, homes were broken into and searched without warrants, suspects were beaten, and "witnesses" were bribed and coerced. Thirty-one persons were indicted; eight stood trial: August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neebe. Although only two of the defendants, Spies and Fielden, were at Haymarket Square when the bomb exploded (Fielden with his wife and child), and although the state never established any connection of the defendants with the incident, an openly biased, handpicked jury convicted them solely on the basis of their political ideas. Worldwide efforts to free them failed, and on November 11, 1887, Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer were hanged. Lingg had committed suicide. It was not until 1893 that Neebe, who had been sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, and Fielden and Schwab, who had had their death sentences commuted, were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld.⁴

In 1908, the attorney general under President Theodore Roosevelt created the Bureau of Investigation within the Justice Department to fill the gap caused by congressional prohibition of using the Secret Service for investigation and intelligence activities. Although there was no formal Congressional authorization for the bureau, once it was established its appropriations were regularly approved by Congress. It was not until 1916 that an amendment to the appropriations statute came to serve as an indirect congressional authorization for bureau investigations.⁵

During World War I, the bureau, aided by the volunteer American Protective League, began to operate as a secret political police force. With the Justice Department, the Bureau investigated the activities of thousands of German immigrants as well as thousands of Americans accused of draft resistance. The 1918 "slacker raids" in New York and New Jersey involved the "mass round-up of 50,000 persons (without warrants) to discover draft evaders. "⁶ The Espionage and Sedition Acts were invoked, resulting in 2,000 prosecutions for "disloyal utterances and activities,"⁷ aimed mainly at socialist and labor groups critical of the government and its policies.⁸ During 1917-1918, bureau agents raided offices of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW—the Wobblies) across the country in a concentrated effort to gather evidence for a mass trial of 166 IWW leaders.⁹

In late 1919, strikes spread throughout America. In Europe there were socialist- and communist-led uprisings. Using these events as justification for increased funding for the bureau, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer told Congress, " ... the bureau is confronted with a very large and important task in connection with social and economic unrest . . . and radicalism. . . . " As the Bureau shifted its attention from critics of the war to the activities of political groups, a special division on radical activities was organized.

... Instead of performing their statutory mission of tracking down and apprehending criminals, federal directives were mounting a massive and unfocused intelligence gathering operation involving the whole field of left wing dissent. ¹⁰

Information collected by bureau agents was given to the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division (GID), an office established by Palmer after a series of bombings in 1919. J. Edgar Hoover was appointed as head of the new division.

One of the bombings referred to above took place on June 2, 1919 near the White House. Two anarchists were taken into custody without formal charges. One was deported and the other, Andrea Salsedo, was held incommunicado by the bureau. A few days later, Salsedo "fell" to his death from the fourteenth floor of the building where he had been incarcerated. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a comrade of Salsedo, began an investigation into the death of his friend. Vanzetti, a Boston shoemaker, quickly came under bureau surveillance. On June 4, he and Nicola Sacco, a fish peddler, organized a protest meeting in Brockton, Massachusetts. On June 5, the two men were arrested on capital charges of which they were later convicted. A nationwide legal struggle for their release was waged for seven years without success, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1926.¹¹

The GID compiled a massive card index containing 450,000 entries on individuals, groups, publications, and, "special circumstances,"¹² and also collected information on "matters of an international nature" as well as "economic and industrial disturbances". Since the only federal law enforceable in noncriminal cases was the deportation statute, the main target of the bureau's drive was aliens and, without congressional authorization, the Justice Department (through the GID) and the Bureau of Investigation jointly planned and organized a nationwide drive to deport foreign radicals from the U.S.. Among the deportees were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. American citizens, however, were not left out since prosecution might be possible under state or existing federal law or under legislation "which may hereinafter be enacted."¹³

The drive to deport radicals culminated in the Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920. The first of these raids took place on November 7, 1919, when 450 people in eighteen cities were arrested.¹⁴ On the night of January 2, 1920, bureau agents, along with Immigration officials, rounded up some 10,000 persons in thirty-three cities.¹⁵

Following the Palmer Raids, every major American city police department created intelligence divisions. From 1919 until 1925, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) arrested 504 union organizers and political activists on charges of "criminal syndicalism." These arrests resulted in 124 convictions, most of which were obtained through the perjured testimony of police informants. The LAPD "Red Squad" became a model intelligence division whose tactics were used by other police agencies across the country ¹⁶

When Warren G. Harding took office in 1921, William J. Burns became director of the bureau. Burns, the former head of the International Detective Agency (IDA), a company specializing in labor spying, aided IDA in its campaign against the IWW, whose destruction was sought by southern California businessmen and southwest copper interests. Four days after taking office, Burns made Hoover assistant director of the bureau. Although the Red Scare had virtually died in the United States, Burns testified before congressional hearings that radicalism was growing in the country. As a result, the bureau's budget rose from $2 million to $2.25 million dollars in 1923.¹⁷

Despite the protests of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the bureau continued its illegal activities. It increasingly relied on the use of agents and paid informants, especially between 1921 and 1924.¹⁸

On August 2, 1923, President Harding died in office and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge. And on March 28, 1924, Coolidge named Harlan Fiske Stone to succeed Harry Daugherty as attorney general. In May, Stone asked Burns to resign as bureau director. The new attorney general told the Senate that he opposed the repressive, lawless activities of the bureau under Daugherty's leadership, and that he, Stone, would reorganize the Bureau, abolishing the GID. He pledged that Justice Department agents would limit their investigations to violations of law.¹⁹ On December 10, 1924, Hoover was appointed director, having convinced Stone and the previously critical ACLU that he was an "unwilling" participant in the Palmer raids.²⁰

While the bureau's domestic political intelligence function was greatly curtailed from 1924 to 1936, efforts to gather such information were continued by state, private, and military intelligence agencies. [In addition], the bureau retained the massive files it had accumulated in the period from 1916 to 1924 and readily transmitted data to other agencies to pursue.

In 1936, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) became by presidential directive "the primary civilian charged with domestic intelligence responsibilities."²¹ Events in Europe provided the rationale for resumption of domestic political investigations when President Franklin Roosevelt asked the FBI to gather intelligence on "subversive" political organizations. There still was no federal law authorizing the kind of probe Roosevelt wanted, but Hoover cited the obscure provision of the 1916 appropriations act to launch a new wave of FBI suppression of radicalism.²²

In 1938, with World War II under way in Europe, Congress created a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and Propaganda in the United States. In 1941, the Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) was passed. This act, which made it a crime to teach or advocate the "duty, desirability, or propriety" of overthrowing the American government by violence, has been described by one of the country's best-known authorities on the law of free speech, Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., as the "most drastic restriction on freedom of speech ever enacted in the United States during peace."²³ A closely related act, the Voorhis Act of 1941, required registration of all "subversive organizations having foreign links and advocating the violent overthrow of the government."²⁴ These sanctions inevitably were extended to include supporters and even latent sympathizers, facilitated by the use of wiretapping which had been authorized by presidential directive in 1940.²⁵

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the arrest and deportation of radicals and "undesirable" aliens increased. A major target of repression during the postwar years continued to be the Communist Party; between 1918 and 1956, U.S. Senate investigations of communism were conducted by eighteen standing committees and one select committee, and House investigations by sixteen standing committees. In 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act.

"The Crime of the Century," in the words of Director Hoover,²⁶ was the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried and convicted without any convincing evidence of their guilt. Worldwide demonstrations and appeals failed during this period of "spy" hysteria, and they were executed on June 19, 1953.

On July 24, 1950, a month after the outbreak of the Korean War, President Harry Truman approved an order written by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, which served as the authority for FBI activities relating to espionage, sabotage, subversive activities, and "related matters. "²⁷ In the early 1950's, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, as well as then Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California, readily seized the opportunity to promote the Red Scare. McCarthy conducted indiscriminate witch hunts, aided by the FBI, and on the basis of falsified information held press conferences and congressional hearings to expose Communists.

African slaves were first brought to America in 1619. These slaves and their descendants vehemently resisted their oppression, and for this resistance, they have suffered beatings, torture, castration, lynching, and other forms of violence.

In 1910, two years after the FBI was founded, Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight world boxing champion, became the first Black American to be hounded and harassed by the FBI. The Mann act was passed in 1910 for the alleged purpose of preventing vice; the legislation outlawed the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. The language of the law was deliberately vague and the prosecution of offenders appears to have been loosened or tightened according to their importance. Reportedly, Johnson had induced a former prostitute to give up her profession and enter into a personal relationship with him. Their travels took them across a state border before their marriage, and Johnson was arrested by federal authorities under the terms of the Mann Act and sentenced to prison.²⁸

In the following years, numerous Black political leaders were harassed by the government. Marcus Garvey, who founded the popular Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1919, was convicted of using the mails to defraud. Garvey, who advocated that American Blacks return to Africa, served a federal prison term and died in poverty.²⁹ Dr. W. E. B. DuBois³⁰ and Paul Robeson³¹ were singled out for harassment for their association with the U.S. Communist Party. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, chairman of the powerful House Education Committee, was forced out of office because of his outspoken views on the oppression of American Blacks.³² Malcolm X, whose political views changed following his split with the Nation of Islam, [and who] helped to inspire the founding of the Black Panther Party³³ was under constant police surveillance in the last year of his life. The two men convicted of his assassination in February 1965 have demanded a new trial on the grounds that they were framed. The Congressional Black Caucus has called for a congressional investigation into Malcolm's death.³⁴

A main target of the FBI COINTELPRO operation during the late 1950's and early 1960's was the civil rights movement. Among the groups singled out for persecution were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Deacons for Defense, the Republic of New Africa (RNA), and the Nation of Islam. Targeted individuals included H. "Rap" Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammed, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr_.³⁵

From December 1963 until his assassination on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was the subject of an intensive COINTELPRO campaign. In the testimony of William Sullivan, who was in charge of the FBI campaign against Dr. King:

No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization which we targeted. We did not differentiate.³⁶

Using its authority to investigate legitimate noncommunist groups suspected of being infiltrated by communists, the FBI sought to discredit and destroy Dr. King and the entire civil rights movement.³⁷

The United Farm Workers (UFW), founded and led by Cesar Chavez, has fought for over a decade for decent wages and living conditions for American farm workers. The strong opposition of business interests to the work of the UFW has made the union a constant target of government and intelligence repression. Informants, undercover agents, and provocateurs have continuously infiltrated the UFW in an effort to destroy the union. On several occasions, union headquarters in California have been burglarized and files stolen by FBI and other intelligence agents.³⁸

American Indians have been murdered, tortured, and isolated by the United States government longer than any other group of people in America. After launching numerous wars against Native Americans and forcing them from their lands in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the government forcibly moved them to reservations operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1970, the American Indian Movement (AIM), a nationwide political organization of Native Americans, was founded by Russell Means and Dennis Banks. Means, Banks, and other Native American leaders and activists have been a prime target of the FBI COINTELPRO campaign, a campaign which has led to numerous false charges, imprisonment, and murder.³⁹

As the preceding pages point out, the war against the Black Panther Party was a logical extension of ongoing police intelligence practices intensified by the explosive situation in American cities during the last sixteen years. Not only are the tactics of infiltration, harassment, and disinformation time-tested, but the tacticians are veterans.

1 Philip S. Foner, ed., The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Monad Press, 1977), pp. 1-2.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., p. 5.

4 Ibid., p. 10.

By 1966, the United States had experienced a recent series of disruptions in several of its major urban Black population centers—Harlem, Watts, Chicago and Detroit¹ Numerous organizations and leaders representing groups of Black people—e.g., SCLC (Martin Luther King, Jr.), the Black Muslims (Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X), CORE (James Farmer), NAACP (Roy Wilkins)—had repeatedly articulated the causes of these riots or urban rebellions: high unemployment, bad housing, police brutality, poor health care, and inferior educational opportunities. Their consensus on the ills that caused or contributed to the violent explosions in inner cities was confirmed by official investigating bodies such as the Kerner and McCone Commissions.² While all groups were generally in agreement on the specific maladies of the society affecting Blacks, they were in disagreement as to the best solution for ending them. The Black nationalists favored separatism; traditional liberals, integration and passage of new legal guarantees; and some of the more activist-oriented demanded "revolution now." Amidst this clamor for social justice, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966.

The Party differed from other organizations representing Black and poor persons in several respects. First, the Panthers embraced from the outset an explicitly socialist ideology, which it soon named "revolutionary intercommunalism." In essence, the Party acknowledged that it was, despite certain differences, basically socialist or Marxist because it followed the dialectical method and sought to integrate theory and practice. As the founder of the Panthers observed:

We are not mechanical Marxists and we are not historical materialists. Some people think they are Marxists when they are actually following the thoughts of Hegel. Some people think they are Marxist-Leninists but they refuse to be creative, and are, therefore, tied to the past. They are tied to a rhetoric that does not apply to the present set of conditions. They are tied to a set of thoughts that approaches dogma...If we are using the method of dialectical materialism we don't expect to find anything the same even one minute later because "one minute later" is history. If things are in a constant state of change, we cannot expect them to be the same. Words used to describe old phenomena may be useless to describe the new. And if we use the old words to describe new events we run the risk of confusing people and misleading them into thinking that things are static.³

This espousal of revolutionary intercommunalism by the BPP obviously influenced the perception of others about it, especially, as will be shown, the federal government. Of equal importance, however, is the effect this ideology has upon the actions of the Party and the decisions of its leadership. Revolutionary intercommunalism provided an important paradigm for interpreting the world, much as a belief in laissez-faire capitalism affects the actions of corporate decision makers who embrace it. Thus, to the BPP, government opposition to its existence was expected as partial confirmation of its raison d' etre. On a more personal level, the BPP leadership felt toward their ideology and its likely opponents that "truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels."⁴

"Revolutionary intercommunalism" not only served to pit the BPP and government law enforcement against each other in ideological struggle, [but also] it gave the Party a perhaps unexpected asset in its struggle for survival. The popular conception of ideology, especially one embracing terminology that seems foreign to traditional democratic politics, is that it is rigid and doctrinaire. Yet to the BPP leadership, its ideology, despite the sound of dogma it may have conveyed to others, served it as a pragmatic methodology for interpreting events. A central tenet of revolutionary intercommunalism, for example, is that "contradiction is the ruling principle of the universe," that everything is in a constant state of transformation. Recognition of these principles gave Party leaders an ability to grow through a self-criticism that many other radical political organizations seemed to lack. Thus, in 1970, Newton could say of the Party:

In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party (BNP). We called ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was revolutionary nationalism. That is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. Therefore we went to a higher level of consciousness. We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. . . We sought solidarity with what we thought were the nations of the world.

But then what happened? We found that because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of the development of technology, because of the development of the mass media . . . and because of the fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Their self-determination, economic determination, and cultural determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling circle. They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism . . . means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves "intercommunalists" because nations have been transformed into communities of the world. The Black Panther Party now disclaims internationalism and supports intercommunalism.⁵

 

A second distinguishing characteristic of the Party has been its specific strategy to achieve revolutionary intercommunalism: the building of "survival" or community service programs.⁶ The purpose of these programs is to enable people to meet their daily needs by developing positive institutions within their communities and to organize the communities politically around these programs. This, of course, is nothing new when one thinks of certain minority or ethnic communities in the United States, such as the Jews or Chinese. Historically, one way these groups have affected their rise from deprivation is by developing communal associations, ranging from fraternal and religious bodies to political machines. The function of these community associations or institutions has been described by Cloward and Piven as "provid[ing] a base from which covert ethnic solidarity evolves into the political force required to overcome various forms of class inequality. They are therefore an important device by which the legitimate interests of particular groups are put forward to compete with those of other groups."⁷

Unfortunately, as Cloward and Piven concede, "the Black community"—and this was especially true in 1966 when the Party was forming—"lack[ed] an institutional framework in private social welfare [as well as in other institutional areas], and the separatist agencies of other ethnic and religious communities [were] not eager to see this deficiency overcome.... "⁸ Hence the BPP emphasized the importance of its survival programs.

An early survival program focused on the issue of police brutality, which was a major concern, nationally and in Oakland, California. Applying knowledge of California law, Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organized police patrols to respond to arrests of citizens that were regularly broadcast over the police officers' short-wave radio.

Several Party members equipped with a shortwave radio in a car intercepted the calls, rushed to the scene of the arrest, and, armed with a law book, informed the person being arrested of his constitutional rights. Party members also carried loaded weapons, publicly displayed but not pointed toward anyone, and dressed in leather jackets and berets. The patrol participants were careful to stand no closer than ten feet from the arrest, to stay within the presumption that they were not interfering with the arrest.⁹ These initial contacts between Panther patrols and Oakland police resulted in the arrests of Party members and [in] considerable publicity.¹⁰ Media portrayals of these confrontations gave the impression that the Panthers were primarily an armed insurrectionary group. One of the reasons for this distorted image was astutely noted by Erik Erikson:

You have all seen the now traditional picture of young Huey Newton like a latter day American revolutionary with a gun in his hands, held not threateningly, but safely pointing upward. To a man of my age, it was, not too long ago, almost impossible to imagine black men carrying guns openly—black vigilantes, black nightriders in automobiles, keeping an eye on (of all things) the law. Most readers of the news, of course, did not and do not know that according to California law, every citizen then had the right to carry a gun, one gun for self-defense and joint defense. But those who created that law certainly did not envisage anybody but white men doing so, nor did they envisage anybody but potential lawbreakers as the ones to be patrolled vigilant citizens in an ill-defined and frontier territory.

. . . [What the BPP did] was to show how the black man's territory has never outlived the frontier state and is still the land of undefined laws; and that arbitrary violence in this territory often comes not from roving outlaws but from those charged with the enforcement of the law. Inclined to disregard the rights of black citizens, they break the law under the guise of defending it. [The BPP] made of the police, then, the symbol of uniformed and armed lawlessness. But [it] did so by ingeniously turning the white man's own imagery (especially dear to the American West and the Western) around against the white world itself. And in arming [themselves] and [their] brothers against that world, [the BPP] emphasized a disciplined adherence to existing law. In fact, [the BPP] patrol member traveled equipped not only with a gun but also with a law book. The book and the fire—it cannot escape us—what an elemental pair of symbols this has been in revolts as far removed from each other as that of the Germans in Luther's day and that of the Zionists in our own.¹¹

The image of Blacks armed for self-defense against police brutality catapulted the Party nationally into the public consciousness and gave an erroneous impression that it advocated armed confrontation. Ironically, however, the single event most responsible for projecting this violent image was itself a pristine case of a group legally petitioning the government for redress of grievances.

The BPP learned in April 1967 of the shooting by Richmond, California police of Denzil Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old Black. Official police accounts claim that the youth was running from the police after they had flagged him down in a stolen car. He reportedly jumped one fence, ran across an automobile junkyard, and was about to jump another fence when an officer shot him. No one claimed that Denzil Dowell was armed. Since he was shot while in the commission of a felony, the police claimed that it was justifiable homicide. But the police account suffered from factual inconsistencies. The victim suffered a hip injury, which made him an unlikely fence-jumper. Moreover, no oil or debris was found on his shoes or clothes, which, had he really run through the automobile junkyard near where he was found, would almost certainly have been present. Finally, several people had witnessed previous threats made by the police to Denzil Dowell, who was apparently viewed by some Richmond law enforcement personnel as a troublemaker.

When BPP members went with Denzil Dowell's family to the sheriff of Contra Costa County to complain about the shooting, they were advised to go to the state capitol in Sacramento and get the law changed that permitted officers to shoot at suspects fleeing the scene of a felony. Party leaders saw this buck-passing as further confirmation of their belief that armed citizen patrols of the police and the arming of the citizenry as guaranteed by the Constitution were the most effective deterrents to excessive use of police force.¹²

Soon after the shooting of Denzil Dowell, an East Bay legislator, Don Mulford, gave the BPP another reason to carry their grievances to the state capitol. Mulford introduced a bill to repeal the law that permitted citizens to carry loaded weapons in public places so long as the weapons were openly displayed.¹³ Obviously, the law Mulford sought to repeal was integral to the BPP's police patrols, which was why it was tagged the "Panther Bill" in numerous media reports. Passage of Mulford's bill, which the Panthers viewed as almost certain, would make it a crime for a citizen, not otherwise licensed, to carry a loaded weapon in a public place, whether openly displayed or concealed. In response to the introduction of this legislation, the BPP sent a delegation to the capitol to protest this attempted disarming of the citizenry. The delegation carried loaded rifles and shotguns, which they publicly displayed. They entered the state capitol, a public place, to make their protest by delivering Executive Mandate No. 1.¹⁴

The legislature responded to this protest by promptly passing the law, which was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. But the gathering of armed Black men on the capitol steps was photographed and published in newspapers and on television throughout the nation. These photographic representations served as a stimulus for Party popularity and growth among young Blacks, hostility by the government, and fear by much of the white citizenry recently racked by a series of Black urban riots.

What never became clear to the public, largely because it was always deemphasized in the media,¹⁵ was that the armed self-defense program of the Party was just one form of what Party leaders viewed as self-defense against oppression. The Party had always urged self-defense against poor medical care, unemployment, slum housing, under-representation in the political process, and other social ills that poor and oppressed people suffer.¹⁶ The Panther means for implementing its concept of self-defense was its various survival programs, symbolized best by the police patrols and the free breakfast program for school children. In addition to these programs, however, the Party early initiated health clinics providing free medical and dental service, a busing program to take relatives of prisoners on visiting days, and an escort and transportation service for residents of senior citizen housing projects, as well as a clothing and shoe program to provide for more of the needs of the local community. It was these broad-based programs, including the free food programs where thousands of bags of groceries were given away to the poor citizens of the community, that gave the Party great appeal to poor and Black people throughout the country.¹⁷ For one of the first times since the organized slave rebellions before the Civil War, Blacks were responding to an organization that tried to build community institutions and did so under the banner of a political ideology that directly challenged democratic capitalism.

The Panthers, despite their explicit repudiation of democratic capitalism as a system that was inherently incapable of permitting Black and poor people from enjoying full and equal participation in it, did not eschew democratic means of reform, nor did they discourage Black capitalism. To the contrary, from its very inception, the Party utilized existing legal machinery in order to bring about social change and encouraged indigenous Black financial enterprises. In addition to the legal police patrols already mentioned, the Party frequently filed civil law suits seeking relief for its members, ^wand Black and poor people generally, from various injustices.¹⁸ The Panthers also turned to the ballot box, first by running members for mayor and city council in Oakland in 1972 and 1974, and comings surprisingly close to victory. In 1976, Party involvement was admittedly credited by two successful Black candidates for their elections, to the offices of Mayor of Oakland and Supervisor of Alameda County, the first two Black persons to be elected to these positions in Oakland's history, despite a sizeable Black population that had resided there since World War II.¹⁹ Moreover, the Party incorporated some of its main survival programs such as its Intercommunal Youth Institute and Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE). The Youth Institute, a school for more than one hundred Party and other children from the first through the eighth grades, was incorporated as the Educational Opportunities Corporation.²⁰ SAFE was an escort and busing program in which young Blacks took seniors out into the community—a combination of Black and gray power that to some extent provides both groups what they need and desire—people power.²¹ The device of incorporation allowed both survival programs to avail themselves of tax-deductible contributions and some limited government benefits.

The Party also advocated growth of indigenous community businesses, even though they were capitalistic. This is because the Party recognized that Black capitalism has come to mean to many people Black control of another one of the institutions in t thee community. This positive quality of Black capitalism should, the Party felt, be encouraged.

Since the people see Black capitalism in the community as Black control of local institutions, this is a positive characteristic because the people can bring more direction and focus to the activities of the capitalist. At the same time, the Black capitalist who has the interest of the community at heart will respond to the needs of the people because this is where his true strength lies. So far as capital [in] general is concerned, the black capitalist merely has the status of a victim because the big capitalists have the skills, make the loans_„ and in fact control the Black capitalist. If he wants to succeed in his enterprise, the Black capitalist must turn to the community because he depends on them to make his profits. He needs this strong community support because he cannot become independent of the control of the corporate capitalists who control the large monopolies.

The Black capitalist will be able to support the people by contributing to the survival programs of the Black Panther Party. In contributing to such programs he will be able to help build the vehicle which will eventually liberate the Black community. He will not be able to deliver the people from their problems, but he will be able to help build the strong political machine which will serve as a revolutionary vanguard and guide the people in their move toward freedom.²²

A practical application of the Party's view toward Black capitalism and the use of legal means of reform occurred in Oakland, California, in 1971. A group of small Black-owned retail liquor stores and taverns asked the BPP for support in a boycott against Mayfair Supermarkets because Mayfair purchased alcoholic beverages from companies that excluded Black truck drivers. The BPP joined in the boycott, and within a period of days, Mayfair ended its discriminatory practices. The Party then asked the group of Black businessmen who had solicited Party help to make a nominal continuing contribution to one or more survival programs. The businessmen, who had approached the Party initially through an organization called the California State Package Store and Tavern Owners Association (Cal-Pak), declined to contribute except via a single gift. The Party rejected Cal-Pak's offer, stating,

. . . a continuing trickle of support is more important to the community than a large, once-only hush mouth gift. We will not be paid off; we will not be quiet. We will not go away. . . Why should the Black community nourish a Black profiteer who has no concern for his brother?²³

It was considered important to the Party's concept of building community institutions that contributions from the Black businesses not only be continuing, but that they come from the association representing them. This would, in the Party's view, constitute participation through a united front and build Cal-Pak as a community institution along with the survival programs. Since the Party had been asked for assistance in the Mayfair boycott by representatives of Cal-Pak, it also followed logically that Cal-Pak should support the survival programs. When Cal-Pak refused, the Party called for a boycott of the liquor stores of the president of Cal-Pak, Bill Boyette, and picketed the two liquor stores he owned. Five months later, Cal-Pak and the Party reached an agreement. Congressman Ronald Dellums, who helped negotiate the settlement, announced at a press conference in January 1972 that:

. . . an agreement has been reached of great importance to all of the people in the Bay Area and, in particular, the Black population of this area. This agreement, between the Black Panther Party and the Ad Hoc Committee for Promotion of Black Business, officially ends the boycott of Boyette's Liquor Stores by the Black Panther Party. . . The United Fund of the Bay Area, Inc., sponsored and created by the Ad Hoc Committee for the Promotion of Black Business and the Cal-Pak Liquor Dealers, has already begun the task of collecting funds from Black businesses and individuals for programs of special need in the Black community. Operating as a nonprofit social vehicle for the Black community, this new organization will make disbursements to various significant organizations in the Black community on a regular and continuing basis. Among the programs that will benefit are the survival programs of the Black Panther Party.²⁴

This willingness by the Party to use democratic means of reform and to support Black capitalism was criticized by some as inconsistent with the Panther ideology of revolutionary intercommunalism. This is partly because progressive people quite correctly observe that "It is very clear, upon reflection, what function law serves within any culture. It protects the culture's ideology. Under capitalism it protects property, the men who own it and guard it."²⁵ From this observation, it is only a brief inferential step to the conclusion that, because law is a product and perpetuator of corporate interests in this country, it cannot be a force for significant socioeconomic change. But while this conclusion is logical in a mechanistic-sense, it is illogical, and therefore wrong, in a dialectical sense:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life... [I]f somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is basis, but the various elements of the super-structure: political forms of the class struggle . . . constitutions established by the victorious class . . . judicial forms, had even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants . . . also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.²⁶

In sum, the Panthers combined a unique blend of elements that set them apart from traditional civil rights and minority organizations: a revolutionary ideology that argued for the necessity of fundamental socioeconomic change, a practical series of survival programs that served the community and fostered institutional growth and consciousness, and a willingness to employ creative legal means within the democratic system to achieve their ends. It was these unique elements that made the Panthers popular with many Blacks and, at the same time, a nemesis to the federal government.

1 See, e.g., James Reston, "The Shame of the Cities," New York Times, 24 July 1966, p. 10E, col. 5.

2 For example, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968; California Governor's Commission on the

Los Angeles Riots, "Violence in the City—End or Beginning," 1965.

3 Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 25-26; see also Appendix C. [Publisher's note—New York: Writers and Readers, 1995.]

4 Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (New York: Bantam Press, 1977), p. 82.

5 Newton, To Die for the People, pp. 31-32.

6 At a seminar at Yale University in 1971, Newton was asked by a student, "What [do] you do to relate to People on the human level, how [do] you set yourselves up as examples as the kind of thing you are talking about. I mean, what do you actually do?" He answered that the Party has "a series of survival programs—survival until the people become more self-conscious and mature. . . These programs are open to everyone in the community. We have health clinics; we have a busing program for parents and relatives and friends of prisoners who would not be able to visit the prison. . . because they do not have the money. . . Now these are reformist kinds of programs, but they have been integrated into the rest of our revolutionary program. . . We know they won't solve the problem. But because we are interested in the People, we serve the People." (Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton, In Search of Common Ground [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973], pp. 87-88.) The Party's platform and program, originally adopted in 1966, and amended in 1976, are reprinted in Appendices A and B.

7 Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, The Politics of Turmoil (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 195.

8 Ibid.

9 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 120-121.[Publisher's note—New York: Writers and Readers, 1995.]

10 Ibid.

11 Erickson and Newton, In Search of Common Ground, pp. 45-46.

12 A detailed account of this incident is found in the chapter entitled "Denzil Dowell," in Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 137-144.

13 California Penal Code, Sections 12031 and 171.c.

14 The full text of Executive Mandate No. is found in Newton, To Die for the People, pp. 7-8.

15 To be sure, the media was often assisted in emphasizing the violent image of the Party by the FBI and other federal agencies. See Chapter IV.

16 Affidavit of Huey P. Newton, filed in Black Panther Party v. Donald C Alexander, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, No. C-74-1247, U.S. Fed. Ct. (N.D. Cal. 1974)

17 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 163-170.

18 For example, Black Panther Party v. Kehoe, 42 C.A.3d 645, 117 Call. Rept. 6 (1974) (public records act suit to compel state agency to make "public" complaints it receives from consumers concerning abusive collection agency practices); Black Panther Party v. Granny Goose, No. 429566, Alameda I Superior Ct. (1972) (suit against ten major employers in Oakland, California to compel them to comply with California's "pay while voting" statute, which requires employers to post notices before certain elections informing their employees that they are entitled to up to two hours off work with pay in order to vote).

19 A confidential IRS memorandum candidly noted that, "as early as 1968 the Black Panther Party supported and ran candidates. . . . In 1972 the political machinery of the BPP proved its effectiveness with a massive registration drive. This campaign was conducted through the BPP newspaper. . . . Success was achieved when six of the nine candidates running on the BPP slate were elected to the board of directors of Model Cities in Oakland. Four other Panther members were also elected to [the] antipoverty council in Berkeley. Two BPP officers, Bobbie [sic] Seale and Elaine Brown, ran for the positions of Mayor and Councilwoman of Oakland, respectively.

Although they were defeated, the BPP had attained enough votes to demonstrate that they could be a viable force." (Memorandum from IRS Revenue Agent Chinn to Group Manager and District Director of San Francisco District, No. FA-1464, December 1, 1975.)

20 The IRS noted that "although some of the [BPP] programs have been terminated . . . or cut back due to lack of funds, a major step has been achieved through the construction of the Community Learning Center building [i.e., EOC]. Most of the Panther activities are now concentrated at the Center." (Ibid., Appendix, p. iv.)

21 Hager, "Panthers, New Image—Joining the System," Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1972, p. 1, col. 1.

22 Newton, To Die for the People, p. 106.

23 Ibid., p. 111.

24 Ronald Dellums, quoted in Newton, To Die for the People, p. 109.

25 George Jackson, "From Dachau, Soledad Prison, California," in Robert Lefcourt, ed., Law Against the People (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p. 227.

26 Friedrich Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, quoted in William Franklin Ash, Marxism and Moral Concepts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), p. 124. A more contemporary revolutionary has affirmed this same principle: "Some people think . . . that in the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; . . . and in the contradiction between the economic foundation and its super-structure, the economic foundation is the principal aspect; and there is no change in their respective positions. This is the view of mechanistic materialism, and not of dialectical materialism. True, the productive forces . . . and the economic foundation generally manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But under certain conditions, such aspects as relations of production theory and the superstructure in turn must manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role, this must also be admitted..." (Mao Tse-tung, "On Contradiction," quoted in Ash, Marxism and Moral Concepts, p. 124.)

 

IV. RESPONSE OF THE GOVERNMENT TO
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

 

Upon Richard M. Nixon's election as president in 1968, the administration addressed itself, in the words of former White House Counsel John Dean, to the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.¹

A "White House Enemies List" was drawn up by officials of the Nixon administration. In its original form, this list contained the names of only a few minority political parties or organizations, among them the Panthers, whom the administration linked with "Hughie [sic] Newton," and "George Wallace" of the American Independent Party.² Interestingly, though their expressed ideologies were quite opposite, both organizations shared the common feature of having strong grassroots support and active involvement by [their] members, in contrast to the established Democratic and Republican parties.³ The Enemies List was then incorporated into a detailed plan, commonly known as the Huston Plan, after its White House designated coordinator, Tom Charles Huston.⁴ This plan was approved in 1970 by the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA).⁵ It advocated blanket presidential authorization for such practices as wiretapping, mail covers, and black-bag jobs or break-ins. Its main purported function was to improve interagency cooperation among the major intelligence agencies.⁶ Although this proposed plan was first approved, but allegedly later disapproved by President Nixon because J. Edgar Hoover decided not to continue to cooperate,' the tactics advocated had already been employed by various federal agencies, particularly the FBI, against the Panthers.

Just why the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies focused early on the Party as an "enemy" organization is not difficult to understand. At the start of World War II, President Roosevelt directed the bureau to refocus its resources on priorities it had purportedly given up in 1924—the investigation of political organizations and affiliations.⁸ Distinctions between foreign espionage and domestic dissident groups became blurred during the height of the war; in fact, "vigilance and caution grew into xenophobia and distrust of anyone who veered noticeably from the political mainstream."⁹

The Cold War followed, with President Truman's establishment of the Federal Employee Loyalty Program.¹⁰ The bureau, having built up a large contingent of agents to guard the nation's internal security, channeled them into loyalty/security investigations. Thus, the FBI took on officially "the role of a kind of ideological security police, an arbiter of what was inside the boundaries of legitimate political discourse and what [was] outside."¹¹ In the absence of any effective challenge to this role, the bureau continued, essentially unabated.

Not surprisingly, when the Panthers became publicly visible in 1967 and 1968, the FBI felt justified, if not compelled, to devote their full panoply of resources to investigating the organization. In part, this was in response to the BPP's ideology. As the chief of the FBI's counterintelligence program admitted in describing the genesis of the program within the bureau that concentrated on the Panthers:

We were trying first to develop intelligence so we would know what they were doing [and] second, to contain the threat . . . . To stop the spread of communism, to stop the effectiveness of the Communist Party as a vehicle of Soviet intelligence, propaganda and agitation.¹²

A more flamboyant assessment was provided by Edward Miller, former assistant director of the FBI in charge of the Intelligence Division, upon his retirement in 1974:

Rome lasted for six hundred years, and we are just coming on to our two-hundredth. That doesn't mean that we have four hundred to go. We have to step back and look at ourselves protectively. . . . How much of this dissent and revolution talk can we really stand in a healthy country? Revolutions always start in a small way. ... Economic conditions are bad; the credibility of government is low. These are the things that the home-grown revolutionary is monitoring very closely. The FBI's attention must be focused on these various situations. If it weren't, the Bureau wouldn't be doing its job for the American people.... The American people don't want to have to fool around with this kind of thing and worry about it; they don't want to have to worry about the security of their country. . . . We must be able to find out what stage the revolution is in.¹³

The FBI was also aware of and disturbed by the Panther's efforts to build community institutions. Indeed, the one survival program that seemed most laudatory—that of providing free breakfasts to children—was pinpointed by J. Edgar Hoover as the "real longrange threat to American society.¹⁴ The ostensible reason for this was that children participating in the program were being propagandized, which simply meant they were taught ideas, or an ideology, that] the FBI and Hoover disliked. Yet Hoover was not so naive as to believe an overt ideological war was any longer sufficient to garner the support or noninterference necessary for the bureau to destroy the Panthers. A better rationale or cover for the public would have to be employed. This new cover for secret police operations was, as the Huston Plan suggested, a crusade against criminals and terrorists. Now, the administration would fight "crime," not ideologies.

This technique for destroying controversial political organizations is, of course, not new:

History should teach us . . . that in times of high emotional excitement, minority parties and groups which advocate extremely unpopular social or governmental innovations will always be typed as criminal gangs and attempts will always be made to drive them out.¹⁵

Internal FBI and other police agency documents make clear this objective of pinning the label "criminal" on the BPP and its leaders, and trying to link criminal activity to the Party's efforts at getting support for various survival programs. A 1974 memorandum to the director of the FBI from the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office stated that the local FBI office

has continued to follow Newton's and his associates' activities. ". . . Primarily, the . . . office has been pursuing Hobbs Act and/or ITAR-Extortion cases on Newton and/or his associates. Although investigations to date, including contacts with other law enforcement agencies," . . . has failed to develop information indicating that Newton and his associates are extorting funds from businesses. . . . This office is of the opinion that Newton is or has been extorting funds from legitimate businesses. . . .

In addition to the contacts noted above [i.e., the Alcohol, Tobacco, Tax and Firearms Section of the Department of Justice in Oakland, California, the Oakland Police Department, the Berkeley Police Department and various informants], the San Francisco Office is selectively contacting pimps and narcotics pushers in the Oakland area in an attempt to develop further intelligence and positive information concerning possible Federal violations on the part of Newton and his associates.

This matter will continue to receive vigorous investigative attention. ¹⁶

Interestingly, the bureau and others seem to feel that any contribution from a business, whether considered legitimate or not, to the BPP survival programs could not be voluntary; it would have to come from extortion. Despite a failure to obtain any evidence of extortion, the bureau continued to hold the opinion that it took place and to try to develop information for a Hobbs' Act prosecution. In 1973, for instance, the assistant attorney general who figured prominently in the Watergate investigations, Henry E. Peterson, wrote the acting director of the FBI regarding Newton and the BPP:

During the course of filming a movie in Oakland, California, Harvey Bernhard [a film director], was contacted by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who threatened to picket the filming site unless a $5,000 contribution was made to the Black Panther Party. We note that Bernhard now states that while he gave $5,000 to Newton, he does not feel that he was extorted in any way and that he did not wish to testify.

In light of this, and considering that Max Julian [an actor in the film], who was present when Bernhard met Newton, cannot recall any discussion of money or picketing, there is insufficient evidence to warrant prosecution and further investigation is not warranted.¹⁷

Extortion was not, of course, the only crime federal law enforcement agencies tried to pin on the BPP. In his book Agency of Fear, Epstein described how high-level intelligence officers in the Nixon administration used a narcotics cover to expand domestic counterintelligence operations:

Under the aegis of a "war on heroin," a series of new offices were set up, by executive order, such as the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which, it was hoped, would provide the president with investigative agencies having the potential to assume the functions of "the Plumbers" on a far grander scale. According to the White House scenario, these new investigative functions would be legitimized by the need to eradicate the evil of drug addiction.¹⁸

The Nixon administration's exploitation of the narcotics menace to justify expansion of federal investigative agencies achieved extraordinary success:

Between 1968 and 1974, the federal budget for enforcing narcotics laws rose from $3 million to more than $224 million—a seventyfold increase. And this in turn gave the president an opportunity to create a series of highly unorthodox federal agencies.¹⁹

The utility of a narcotics cover appears in numerous internal law enforcement documents concerning the BPP. Various agencies claim within their reports, in fact, to be investigating narcotics use by Panther leaders, especially Huey Newton. When, for example, Newton and some close friends took a one-week Caribbean cruise for a vacation, the FBI sent at least one clandestine agent, who submitted the following report:

[An unidentified informant] stated that his company has recently experienced a heavy increase in bookings aboard the "Starward" [the cruise ship taken] by Blacks, and he suspicions [sic] that this increase is due in part to the availability of narcotics at Porte Prince [sic] and Port Antonio. He stated that his suspicions have been buttressed by the recent confiscation of several pieces of luggage filled with narcotics from a "Starward" passenger.

Inasmuch as reliable sources have identified Newton as a user of cocaine and he is possibly the user of other narcotics, will alert customs personnel to be on the lookout for narcotics in the possession of Newton and any of his party upon their return to Miami.²⁰

Not content merely to alert Customs, the FBI noted that "the information has been disseminated to State Department and CIA. Copies of attached being furnished to the Department (Internal Security and General Crimes Section) and Secret Service."²¹

Indeed, in April 1973, the FBI requested that "all San Francisco agents be aware of either the purchase or use of cocaine by Huey Newton. Any information obtained in this regard should be immediately furnished to both the OPD [Oakland Police Department] and the appropriate Federal Narcotics agency. "²² Six months later, the bureau seemed less interested in Newton's possible use of cocaine than they were about narcotics dealers he might have been hitting-up for contributions to community survival programs.

Source reports from contacts with various and unidentified Negro dope dealers that the big time dope dealers in the Berkeley and Oakland area are out to get Huey Newton. Source reports that Huey is apparently ripping off certain dealers, pimps and whores for large amounts of money and the talk is that "they" are going to get Huey. Source was instructed to determine some hard facts concerning these rumors and to report same immediately.²³

By 1973, this process of employing the narcotics and crime covers reached its climax with the creation of a new intelligence super-agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency. At the time of its formation, the DEA employed more than 4,000 agents and analysts—including some fifty-three former (or detached) CIA agents and a dozen counterintelligence experts from the military or other intelligence agencies. The DEA had the authority "to request wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and to submit targets to the Internal Revenue Service."²⁴ With its contingent of former CIA and counterintelligence agents, it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously, distribute "black" (or misleading) information, plant phony evidence, and conduct even more extreme clandestine assignments.

The origin of DEA and its intended purpose are explained by Epstein as follows:

According to [those] familiar with the plan, [G. Gordon] Liddy proposed . . . to detach agents and specialists who could be relied upon by the White House from the BNDD [Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs], the IRS, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division, and the Bureau of Customs. This new office would operate directly out of the executive office of the president. The beauty of the Liddy plan was its simplicity: it did not even need approval from Congress. The president could create such an office by executive decree, and order all other agencies of the government to cooperate by supplying liaisons and agents. Congress would not even have to appropriate funds, according to those familiar with the Liddy plan: The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which was located in John Mitchell's Department of Justice, could funnel monies via local police departments to finance these new strike forces. The new office would have . . . wiretappers from the BNDD; Customs agents, with their unique "search authority"; IRS agents who could feed the names of suspects into the IRS's target-selection committee for a grueling audit; and CIA agents for "the more extraordinary missions." In addition, since it would control grants from LEAA, this new office could mobilize support from state and local police forces in areas in which it desired to operate.

The most important feature of the Liddy plan, however, was that the White House agents would act under the cloak of combating the drug menace. Since public fears were being excited about this deadly threat to the children of American citizens and their property, few would oppose vigorous measures even if its agents were occasionally caught in such excesses as placing an unauthorized wire-tap. On the contrary, if the dread of drugs could be maintained, the public, Congress, and the press would probably applaud such determined actions. Krogh and the White House strategists immediately saw the advantages to having the new office operate its agents under the emblem of a heroin crusade ... and Liddy's option paper, much modified in form to remove any embarrassing illegalities, was sent to the president with the recommendations of Krogh and Ehrlichman.

Finally, in December 1971, the president ordered Ehrlichman and Krogh to create the permanent White House-controlled investigative unit envisioned in the option paper drawn up by Liddy. The new unit was to be known as the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement.²⁵

On January 28, 1972, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), the permanent investigative force which ostensibly would operate against narcotics traffickers, was officially created by an executive order of the President:

Since there was virtually no precedent for an agency like the Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement, [ODALE director Myles J.] Ambrose had to proceed step by step, in assembling his strike forces. The first step was to appoint regional directors who would superintend and select the federal agents and local police on each strike force in each of the thirty-three target cities he selected. . . . Fifty other lawyers, many of whom Ambrose knew personally, were deployed in instantly created field offices of the new organization. Four hundred investigators were requisitioned from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Bureau of Customs, and Ambrose requested more than a hundred liaisons from the Internal Revenue Service, as well as specialists from other agencies of the government. This was all accomplished during the first thirty days of existence of this new office, in what Ambrose himself referred to as a "monumental feat or organization."

. .. The new strike forces had little resemblance to more conventional law-enforcement forces. These highly unorthodox units, which were being controlled from the White House through the president's special consultant Myles Ambrose, included not only trained narcotics and customs officers but also Immigration and Naturalization Service officers; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms control agents; probation officers; state troopers; and local police officers. . . . With the authority of court-authorized no-knock warrants and wiretaps they could strike at will in any of the target cities and against virtually anyone selected as a target. By March 1972, the strike forces had become operational.²⁶

There was some resistance to Law Enforcement Assistance Administration officials to using LEAA money to finance ODALE operations. They argued that Congress never intended for LEAA grants to be used to bypass the appropriations process:

So with White House assistance, the new office established a series of local organizations, with such names as "Research Associates," through which grants could be made by LEAA. The money was then channeled back to selected strike forces, with these organizations acting, in effect, as money conduits.²⁷

The California conduit for these laundered funds was the Organized Crime and Criminal Intelligence Branch (OCCIB) of the State Department of Justice, which had already been set up in 1970 by California Attorney General Evelle Younger. A report circulated by the OCCIB in 1972 identified among its prime targets the Black Panther Party.²⁸

The creation of a new superagency to direct the counterintelligence activities against the BPP and other dissident groups was an indication of how badly the federal government wanted to destroy the Panthers. The successful extent of coordination between law enforcement agencies intent on getting the BPP is not yet clear, largely because documents showing this direction have yet to be discovered. Still, the general method of operation described by Epstein appears to have been employed against the Party, at least if one focuses on just three agencies for which some documented information is available: the FBI, IRS, and CIA.

Within one year of the formation of the Party, the FBI formed a special counterintelligence program dubbed COINTELPRO.²⁹ The purpose of this program was, in the FBI's own words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists."³⁰ A specific purpose of COINTELPRO was to prevent the rise of a "Messiah," a charismatic Black leader who might "unify and electrify" Black people.³¹ Martin Luther King, Jr., was named as a potential Messiah in the FBI's own secret memorandum establishing COINTELPRO, but after the assassination of King in 1968, the FBI shifted its focus to the Party and its leadership, particularly Huey P. Newton.

J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, publicly stated that the Party constituted "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country . . ." of any organization.³² Of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO alone to disrupt Black groups, 233—or 79 percent^—were specifically directed toward destruction of the Party.³³ Over $100 million of taxpayers' money was expended for COINTELPRO; over $7 million of it allocated for 1976 alone to pay off informants and provocateurs, twice the amount allocated in the same period by the FBI to pay organized crime informants.³⁴

Indeed, while COINTELPRO ostensibly targeted five domestic organizations—which the Bureau dubbed, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist Hate Groups (e.g., the Panthers), and the New Left—it was Blacks, and the Panthers in particular, who received the brunt of the damage. As the Senate Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations found,

The White Hate COINTELPRO also used comparatively few techniques which carried a risk of serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets, while the Black Nationalist COINTELPRO used such techniques extensively.³⁵

The vast arsenal of techniques employed by the bureau against the BPP were tried and tested over the years in foreign espionage. As William C. Sullivan, former assistant to the director, stated:

This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred. . . . We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. They have used [them] against us. . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.³⁶

Specifically, the FBI engaged in or encouraged a variety of actions intended to cause (and in fact causing) deaths of BPP members, loss of membership and community support, draining of revenues from the Party, false arrests of members and supporters, and defamatory discrediting of constructive Party programs and leaders. What follows is an illustrative highlighting of some of these unlawful actions undertaken by the bureau against the BPP.

A major goal of COINTELPRO was to sow dissension within the Party. A 1970 memorandum from Headquarters to the San Francisco field office of the FBI, for example, proposed:

A wide variety of alleged authentic police or FBI material could be carefully selected or prepared for furnishing to the Panthers. Reports, blind memoranda, LHMs [letterhead memoranda] and other alleged police or FBI documents could be prepared pinpointing Panthers as police or FBI informants; ridiculing or discrediting Panther leaders through their ineptness or personal escapades; espousing personal philosophies and promoting factionalism among BPP members; indicating electronic coverage where none exists; outlining fictitious plans for police raids or other counteractions; revealing misuse or misappropriation of Panther funds, pointing out instances of political disruptive material and disinformation; etc. The nature of the disruptive material and disinformation "leaked" would only be limited by the collection ability of your sources and the need to insure the protection of their security.

Effective implementation of this proposal could not help but disrupt and confuse Panther activities. Even if they were to suspect FBI or police involvement, they would be unable to ignore factual material brought to their attention through this channel. The operation would afford us a continuing means to furnish the Panther leadership true information which is to our interest that they know and disinformation which, in their interest, they cannot ignore.³⁷

Obviously, falsely labeling people as informants in any organization carries with it a serious potential risk to the reputation and, in some situations, safety of that person. This is especially true if the combined counterintelligence techniques employed convince the organization that their friends have been imprisoned or harmed because of the targeted informant. Fully aware of this obvious fact, the bureau nonetheless rationalized the placing of "snitch jackets" on innocent people:

You have to be able to make decisions and I am sure that labeling somebody as an informant, that you'd want to make certain that it served a good purpose before you did it and not do it haphazardly.... It is a serious thing. . . . As far as I am aware, in the Black extremist area, by using that technique, no one was killed. I am sure of that.³⁸

When asked whether the absence of any deaths was the result of "luck or planning," this same bureau official, George C. Moore, then chief of the Racial Intelligence Section, answered, "Oh, it just happened that way, I am sure."³⁹ The certitude of Moore's assertion is unfortunately belied by the bureau's own confidential memoranda, more than one of which claimed that the Party murdered "members it suspected of being police informants."⁴⁰ Indeed, the FBI worked closely with Connecticut authorities in trying to convict two Party leaders, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, of conspiracy to murder Alex Rackley, an alleged informant. Seale and Huggins were not convicted, but the government's chief witness against them, the person who admittedly participated in Rackley's killing, appears from facts disclosed during and after the trial to have been an agent or informant. At the very least, this person's immediate enrollment in an Ivy League institution after the murder trial, and subsequent employment by the administration of an eastern university, raises serious questions.⁴¹ In any event, the use of snitch-jackets by the bureau was widespread. The Senate Select Committee reports several instances of this technique without any apparent follow-up as to the consequences to the persons wrongly jacketed. Among the instances cited was one in San Diego where a Black Panther leader was arrested by the local police with four other members of the BPP. The others were released, but the leader remained in custody. Headquarters authorized the field office to circulate the rumor that the leader "is the last to be released" because "he is cooperating with and has made a deal with the Los Angeles Police Department to furnish them information concerning the BBP." The Target of the first proposal then received an anonymous phone call stating that his own arrest was caused by a rival leader.⁴²

Leaders of the BPP were frequently targeted as snitches or sell-outs by the FBI in an effort to discredit or bring harm to them, especially Huey Newton. Upon Newton's release from prison in 1970, for instance, after a court of appeal reversed his conviction for manslaughter in the alleged shooting of an Oakland policeman, a memorandum from the FBI director instructed FBI field offices across the country to formulate COINTELPRO actions directed against Newton. FBI headquarters would direct the campaign; its contours were defined as follows:

To demythicise [sic] Newton, to hold him up to ridicule, and to tarnish his image among BPP members can serve to weaken BPP solidarity and disrupt its revolutionary and violent aims. [COINTELPRO actions] should have the 3-pronged effect of creating divisiveness among BPP members concerning Newton, treat him in a flippant and irreverent manner, and insinuate that he has been cooperating with police to gain his release from prison.⁴³

Within a week, the New York FBI field office had drawn up three phony letters, which attempted to discredit Newton. One message, to be mailed to the New York office of the Black Panther Party by the San Francisco FBI field office, read as follows:

Brothers, I am employed by the State of California and have been close to Huey Newton while he was in jail. Let me warn you that this pretty nigger may very well be working for pig Reagan. I don't know why he was set free but I am suspicious. I got this idea because he had privileges in jail like the trustees get. He had a lot of privacy most prisoners don't get. I don't think all his private meetings were for sex. I am suspicious of him.

Don't tell Newton too much if he starts asking you questions—it may go right back to the pigs.

Power to the People ⁴⁴

FBI headquarters regarded this anonymous letter as "excellent," but cautioned "Take usual precautions to insure letters cannot be traced to Bureau. Advise Bureau and interested offices of positive results achieved."⁴⁵

The Philadelphia FBI field office prepared and sent to Newton a fictitious Black Panther Party directive, supposedly prepared by the Philadelphia Black Panther office, which questioned Newton's leadership abilities; accompanying it was a cover letter purportedly from an anonymous Party supporter accusing the Philadelphia chapter of "slandering its leaders in private."⁴⁶ FBI headquarters, in approving this operation, noted that prior COINTELPRO action which "anonymously advised the national headquarters that food, clothing and drugs collected for BPP community programs were being stolen by BPP members" had resulted in criticism of the Philadelphia chapter by the national office, transfer of members, "and the national office has even considered closing the Philadelphia chapter." The memorandum concluded, "we want to keep this dissension going. "⁴⁷

The Los Angeles FBI office suggested that a death threat against Newton be sent to Black Panther leader David Hilliard, purportedly from a contract killer.⁴⁸ FBI headquarters stopped this action, however, in the belief that if Newton were to be murdered then, the letter might be traced to the bureau by postal authorities.⁴⁹

When Angela Davis, then one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, was arrested in New York City in mid October 1970 and charged with conspiracy in the Marin County Courthouse incident, the FBI falsely tried to cast Newton as the fingerman:

In view of the fact that there is suspicion in the Negro [sic] community that DAVIS was "set up," NYO suggests that HUEY NEWTON ... be cast in the light as "fingerman." If such a ploy could be successfully carried out it might result in disruption in the Black Nationalist field as well as divorcing BPP from CPUSA and Militant New Left groups.⁵⁰

One handwritten letter was sent to Ebony magazine by the Chicago FBI field office, "mailed from a Negro [sic] as follows:

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

As of this writing, our lovely Sister Angela languishes in jail and her chances of freedom seem remote. She's got to pay the man, right? But the question I put to you is: Who did the money pay?

You know and I know the pigs can't come up with a Black in a Black community just by driving around the streets and hassling the Brothers. I tell you that Sister Davis would still be free if her capture was left to the federal pigs alone. Of course, it was not that way at all. There was bread—lots of pure cash rye—put into an eager Black hand which in turn twisted the knife of treachery in our Sister's back.

Now, the big question is who? Who was the cat who dishonored his skin and took the 30 pieces of silver?

Some of the west coast cats are looking hard at Brother Newton. Shit, you say, Huey would never sell out to pig country. He's a dedicated Nationalist, leader of the Brothers and Sisters and a cat with real soul. Maybe it's bullshit, but let's look at Huey a little closer. He gets sprung from a stiff rap in August. The man suddenly turns kind and sets our Brother free. In that same month Sister Angela is among the missing as the result of a frame the pigs laid on her. What did Huey give for the sunlight and flowers? Or better still, what did the man give sweet Huey? How come Huey's size 12 mouth has been zippered since our Sister's bust? Nothing, he says. Absolutely nothing. Not one appeal for justice. No TV, no papers, no radio, no nothing. He got five grand, so the cats say. It's enough to make a man wonder. Wouldn't be surprised if Huey didn't split the scene soon. I, for one, will be most interested.

A Friend of Sister Angela ⁵¹

Another handwritten letter was mailed to the Village Voice newspaper by the New York FBI field office:

Sister Angela is in jail. Poindexter is free. Huey Newton is free. David P. is a dumb-head and a hop-head. Forget him. But Huey is smart. Gets along well with the MAN. The question is: Did this cat bank five big bills lately ... as a gift from the federal pigs?

Concerned Brother ⁵²

The bureau did not miss any chance to further its disinformation campaign. Later, in the fall of 1970, the San Francisco FBI field office sent an unsigned letter, purportedly from a "white revolutionary," to Newton criticizing the Party-sponsored Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention: "You," the letter concluded, "must be held responsible for this fiasco and it is due to your total incompetence for selecting stupid lazy niggers to do the job and you and your whole party have set the revolution back five years. "⁵³ When the Howard University student newspaper printed a letter signed "Concerned Students of Howard University," which was critical of Huey Newton and the Party, the San Francisco FBI field office mailed Xerox copies to seventeen newspapers in northern California; the letter had been prepared and sent to the student newspaper in the first place by the Washington, D.C., FBI field office.⁵⁴

When Newton's conviction for allegedly shooting a policeman was reversed in 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover immediately requested official authorization from Attorney General John Mitchell for "a microphone surveillance and a telephone surveillance at apartment 25A, 1200 Lakeshore, Oakland"⁵⁵—Huey Newton's new residence. Hoover considered it "likely that high-level party-conferences will be held at this location," and he reminded Mitchell "that existing telephone surveillance on certain Black Panther officers, all of which have been authorized by you, have provided extremely valuable information on Black Panther Party involvement in foreign matters and plans for violent acts against top officials of this country and foreign diplomatic personnel."⁵⁶ (The ending clause, clumsily tacked on the sentence, was the requisite "national security" justification for covert action.) Hoover's request concluded with the observation that "trespass will be involved with respect to the microphone surveillance. "⁵⁷

Mitchell approved the request, and San Francisco FBI agents paid the building engineer, Roger DuClot, to accompany them in breaking into Newton's apartment to install the microphone in the wall.⁵⁸

But the FBI was not content with surveillance. On November 24, 1970, the San Francisco FBI field office proposed an additional COINTELPRO operation concerning Newton's new apartment. The field office proposed a media campaign which would characterize the apartment as a "luxurious lakeshore" penthouse, far more elegant than "the ghetto-like BPP 'pads' and community centers" utilized by the Party.⁵⁹ However, the field office agreed to refrain "presently" from leaking "this information to cooperative news sources" because of a "pending special investigative technique [i.e., the 'bug' and wiretaps]."⁶⁰

Once the installation of the surveillance devices had been completed, the FBI gave the "plush penthouse" story to one of the bureau's key media "assets," reporter Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Examiner.⁶¹ Shortly, Montgomery's FBI-furnished article was featured on the front page of the Examiner. Pleased with this quick success, the San Francisco field office mailed copies of the feature article, anonymously, to "all BPP offices across the United States and to three BPP contacts in Europe. "⁶² Additional copies were mailed to newspaper editors in all cities where the BPP was active.

To bolster the innuendos of lavish living and misuse of Party funds, the FBI sent a fictitious letter from a national Black Panther Party officer to Party chapters in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The message, mailed from Oakland, read in part:

Comrades:

Too many of your leaders have now turned this movement into something to line their own pockets and have little regard for the man on the street selling "The Black Panther." Ask the members of your chapter coming to the national where the Comrade Commander and the Chief of Staff live. Huey Newton lives miles from another nigger and you'll never find him in National Headquarters.

If you're lucky you can see him buying drinks for white freaks in Oakland supper clubs. ...⁶³

In addition, FBI Headquarters formulated a COINTELPRO plan to "embarrass BPP leader Huey Newton through use of a fictitious bank account, indicating misappropriations of BPP funds."⁶⁴ This plan required that:

a fictitious bank account record be created in the name of HUEY P. NEWTON through an appropriate bank which will cooperate with the Bureau confidentially. A photostat of a false ledger card could be prepared and mailed to national headquarters anonymously along with an appropriate letter condemning NEWTON. The account should show regular sizable deposits over a period of several years and have a sizable balance existing.⁶⁵

Beginning April 1, 1971, and for months thereafter, the FBI paid "$540 per month . . . for the rental of apartment 25B, 1200 Lakeshore, Oakland, California. "⁶⁶ In this apartment, adjacent to the one in which Newton was living, the FBI placed an undercover agent with instructions to keep Newton under physical surveillance, as well as monitoring the electronic eavesdropping devices. Subsequently, hardly a day passed when Newton was not followed or observed by a plainclothes agent on all of his travels to and from the apartment building.

One of the undercover agents placed in apartment 25B was Don Roberto Stinnette, who was described (in an FBI case report on Newton) as "involved with local drug traffic. "⁶⁷ Stinnette, who professed to be on parole from a California prison, remained in the apartment for several months while he spied on Newton, his associates, and guests.

On November 18, 1972, Newton's wife, Gwen Fountaine Newton, discovered several men burglarizing and ransacking their apartment when she returned unexpectedly:

After leaving the apartment with Huey, I returned with Huey's niece, Deborah, because I had forgotten something. I entered to find three men robbing the apartment. They held me at gunpoint. Their pistols had silencers on them. Huey's documents and other papers were strewn about on the floor.⁶⁸

Files and records, along with clothes and heavy furniture, were taken by these men from the apartment—a closed, supposedly secure complex with a doorman and basement garage that could be entered only with the aid of an apartment-supplied electronic garage-door opener. How and why did these men enter this complex, burglarize the penthouse apartment, and leave undetected with so much stolen property? The Party believes that the stolen records and materials were actually moved next door during the robbery to the apartment of the FBI agent or informant. Later, when it was convenient to go unnoticed, the materials were quietly but openly moved out in crates and boxes from an art exhibit supposedly held in this same agent's apartment.⁶⁹

Literally no tactic was too bizarre, unconscionable, or extreme for government intelligence officials. On Saturday morning, February 18, 1973, at 5:30 a.m., a squad of Oakland police officers conducted a raid on the twenty-fifth floor of Huey Newton's apartment building. For cover, they had obtained a warrant, "authorized for night service," for the arrest of Don Roberto Stinnette for unpaid traffic tickets. The police team proceeded to engage in a shootout with Stinnette, who was equipped with a semiautomatic rifle, in the hall outside Newton's apartment. Newton refused to take the bait to open his door. Surprisingly, neither Stinnette nor police were injured. Later, the media reported the news of gunfire at the "swank apartment . . . next door to Black Panther leader Huey Newton's.^"70 But the press had missed what was perhaps the real story: That the police and undercover agent had staged the entire shootout in hopes that Newton could be drawn out of his apartment where he could be shot.

It is not difficult to divine the intended effect of these FBI actions, or just why the bureau felt they might, through the aggregate of activity, neutralize the Party's founder. In the words of one observer:

Do you remember what it is like to have one friend mad at you, against you, or even an enemy, or someone out to get you as may have happened occasionally when you were a kid? But how many of us have this baring experience now? Occasionally someone may be after our job or promotion, but not our life or our freedom. We cannot even imagine what it is like to have one o